Independence Day: Resurgence

I do think Independence Day: Resurgence suffered from the absence of Will Smith, because while the film was equally as cheesy as its predecessor, it was less funny, a deficit that the massively improved special effects couldn’t hope to fill, and the simplicity of the original film’s plot was replaced by a more convoluted attempt at backstory and an unashamed sequel plug that fell flat. Overall I would probably give it a 5 out of 10, being very generous with my rating, because the new faces in the cast did not inspire any emotional reactions from me. If they had perished, I wouldn’t have cared.

Those of the original cast who remained were somewhat criminally underused – David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) didn’t have enough screentime or the right kind of surrounding characters to play his sarcastic humour off on; former president Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman) wasn’t around long enough or shown with his daughter enough to make his heroic sacrifice more affecting; and Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch) has some sweet moments with a family of orphaned kids who rescue him, but he doesn’t have any comedic moments like the first film.

Resurgence is set twenty years after the first film. Most of the world has recovered, deconstructing alien technology from the destroyed ships in order to achieve the technological advances we have in the 21^st century plus better weapons, a base on the moon, anti-gravity, and faster space travel. In Africa, one of the ships actually landed, and the local people fought for ten years to defeat the surviving aliens under the command of a warlord. Thomas Whitmore, older and physically debilitated, is still deferentially looked after as a VIP with a security team, with his now grown-up daughter Patricia an aide in the White House to the current president (Sela Ward). Steven Hiller (Will Smith) died in the period between the films in an accident during a test flight of an alien-human technological hybrid ship, but his stepson Dylan has grown up to become a commander in a legacy squadron. Dylan has an ongoing feud with Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth), a cocky pilot who aspired to the status Dylan has achieved but nearly got Dylan killed in a training accident several years ago.

David Levinson runs the Space Defence Force – his ex-wife having conveniently disappeared into a plot hole so he could have a contrived flirting romance with some woman with a French surname – and he travels to that bit of Africa to speak to the warlord’s son, where he discovers that the ship there has been transmitting a distress signal into deep space, which someone is now apparently answering. Thomas Whitmore is suffering from peculiar visions and portents of doom, attributed to the residual effect of the alien’s mind invasion twenty years ago, and Dr Okun, who everyone thought was killed, has actually been in a coma from his encounter with the alien at Area 51, from which he now awakens with the same doom visions as Whitmore. The aliens conveniently return in time for Independence Day, this time with a 3,000 mile wide ship that actually lands on the Earth, its gravity sweeping chunks of Asian cities into the air and dropping them down on London. Better armed and better prepared, they quickly overwhelm Earth’s abortive response to the new threat, destroying the moon base, taking out the President and her cabinet in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex bunkers, and causing an even bigger death toll than before.

The film reveals new information about the aliens, which become known as the “Harvesters” – not locusts as originally envisioned, but eusocial like ants, the invasion fleets are led by a Harvester Queen and they actually intend to drill into Earth’s core and drain it off to use as fuel for their vast civilization-ship, which is big enough to contain its own ecosystem. (We get to see it when the band of young heroes we don’t give a shit about end up trapped in there for a while.)

The ship that landed in Africa had started this drilling process but the destruction of the mothership twenty years ago ended its operations. The aliens pick up this right where they left off, giving the film an arbitrary deadline to defeat them by before the core is drained and the Earth destroyed in the process. The Harvester Queen, much larger than her drones, is smarter than her predecessor and manages to lure the bombers of the counterattack into a trap, disable global communications, take out Earth’s space defences, assassinate the President and almost every in the line of presidential succession, all within a fraction of the time taken by the city-destroyers first time around. The key to defeating them is found within a craft that arrived – and was shot down, mistakenly under the belief it was a scout for the Harvesters – just before the Harvesters turned up over the moon. It contains a Sphere holding an artificial intelligence from another world. The Harvesters have spent thousands of years fighting an interstellar war with other alien civilizations, including the Sphere’s own, who shed their biological bodies to become computer brains, with the Sphere’s remnant people now aiding refugees of another wrecked worlds in training to fight the Harvesters, developing technology that could defeat them.

The Harvester Queen discovers the Sphere’s presence on Earth when it is activated at Area 51 to talk to the humans, which leads to her swiftly moving in that direction to take it out (“now, Princess, we will discuss the location of your secret Rebel base”). If they can take out the Queen, the other alien ships will sod off, because they will be “recalled” by other Harvester Queens who for some reason won’t be interested in finishing what the current Queen started. That’s a gaping plot hole if ever I saw one.

Cue the race against time to use the Sphere to bait the Queen into a trap and destroy her before the Earth’s molten core is sucked down by her ship. At the end of the film, the Sphere invites the survivors of humanity to spearhead the fightback against the Harvesters by joining the other alien refugees to take the war direct to the enemy, and thus is announced the intention to produce another sequel.

Yawn. If there’s a third film, I don’t think I will bother to watch it. The Jungle Book, while equally an attempt by the studios to capitalise on a classic film, was a much better watch. I’m glad I saw it but it wasn’t good enough to invest in a DVD as I have no desire ever to watch it again.